MAGALI M. CARRERA: Biography

Chancellor Professor Magali Carerra received her MA, Masters of Philosophy, and PhD from Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She earned her BA in Art History from Arizona State University. Along with history of art surveys, Professor Carrera teaches courses on the art and culture of ancient Mexico and Peru, traditional Africa as well as feminist theory and the history of art. She received the 2002-2003 University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Teacher of the Year Award and the Class of 2003 Award for Distinguished Service to Students.

Dr. Carrera is the author of publications on the visual culture of Mexico including “Fabricating Specimen Citizens: Nation-building in Nineteenth-Century Mexico” in The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas (2008) and “El Nuevo [Mundo] no se parece á el Viejo”: Racial Categories and the Practice of Seeing” in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (2009). Her book on the visual culture of eighteenth-century Mexico, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (University of Texas Press, 2003) received the 2004 College Art Association/Association for Latin American Art Book Award.

Professor Carrera’s current research examines maps and their relationship to nation-building discourses of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. Her article, “Creole Landscapes,” appears in Mapping Latin America: Space and Society, 1492-2000 (2011). In her new book, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Duke University Press, 2011), the cartography of nineteenth-century Mexico is contextualized in an emerging national and international visual culture.

At present, Dr. Carrera is on leave from the Department of Art History.

Research Interest:

Visual cultures of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico.

Sample Courses:

At present, Dr. Carrera is on leave from the Department of Art History.